Day 19: Austin

So today I’m happy to report a two-day headway on the journey so far. I woke early-ish in Austin at a strange hotel that I didn’t really care for – one of those, nice till you scratch the surface and see things aren’t what they seem. After a bit of a kerfuffle with the receptionist who clearly hadn’t a clue what she was doing, some dude appeared and gave me the all clear and I was out the door. It was hot today – not heat-wise, but humid-wise. Before I got to the car I could feel beads of sweat forming on my brow, and in that moment I realised I’d forgotten to get a bag of ice and was literally too lazy to go back in for fear idiot receptionist girl would charge me for it (she was trying to double charge me for the room!).

As I sat into the car, I was kinda stumped. This was day 3 of GPS issues and it seemed to be working OK as I turned the key. But my AT&T was still out of whack (I tried tweeting the Meteor guys who were slow to respond and didn’t hold out much hope). And to top it all, while I was trying to get to the bottom of the AT&T issue last night, I restored my phone from backup and it (during the night) connected to the MiFi and ate up all the data on it ($60 worth!). So I was frustrated to say the least, and that stupid Hertz Neverlost GPS thing was bugging me with its nuisance. So I tapped in ‘breakfast austin tx’ into Google and a few minutes later I was pulling out of the parking lot headed for Magnolia Café on Congress Street. There I found a menu of dishes laden down with cheese – literally almost every order came with cheese and a side of cheese with cheese on top. Which is super for you if you like cheese, but me, not so much. Reluctantly I ordered something called – I dunno what it was called but basically it was sausage chunks (what they pass off as sausage here isn’t really sausage, more of a herb-based meat product of indescribable texture), home fries and two eggs on top covered in CHEESE. It was pretty passable and not very appealing due to the volume of oil. The gingerbread pancake was delicious however. I kinda felt sorry for the slightly hard-of-hearing older Texan to my right who felt the same as me when he looked at the menu – lots of items that look great but there’s something to throw you off the scent in each one. Anyway during the meal I got my AT&T back – although I gave credit to Meteor on Twitter (which I may add they did sweet damn all to acknowledge – ungrateful perhaps?!) – I think it was me who fixed it by manually selecting AT&T (although I had already tried this, but today it seemed to stick).

Out the door the GPS was acting cuckoo again. This was really starting to piss me off as I did have a map but it’s a USA map not a street map, and also I could have used my iPhone with MiFi but that was gone and then Meteor decided to kick me in the nuts by saying my meagre allowance of 200MB of roaming data had been consumed and I’d now have to pay €10.41 per MB (megabit or megabyte, that’s ridiculous!). So I was in the dark navigationally speaking. After I got some ice across the street (and managed to crack it apart into the cooler – loosing some to the sidewalk I might add) I turned to look down ‘Congress’ street in the hope that it would lead to Capitol Hill and sure enough it did – so this would be pretty straightforward and the GPS woes would wait for later. After parking up and walking up the streets of Austin to the building which George W. Bush occupied as Governor for many years before ‘assuming’ the role of President (sarcasm). It’s not as pretty at the dome level as San Francisco City Hall is or the California State Capitol, and it’s nowhere near as gaudy and monolithic as the Utah State Capitol or the Iowa State Capitol, it looks as though someone put some brown supergloss paint on the roof actually. Inside I was greeted by metal detectors (and interestingly, that’s what I remembered that these were NOT present in Utah – maybe the LDS guys know the real action ISN’T in the Capitol but in the LDS “Office Building” #conspiracy). Inside I quickly snapped pictures and walked around the rotunda to see the portrait of Bushy. Rick Perry is the current governor (for over 12 years almost) so his portrait isn’t up there yet, but someone’s gotta come down because there’s no space left! Anyway, I digress. I looked into both the Senate and House chambers – usual stuff in these bicameral legislatures, the Senate is a fraction of the size of the House of Representatives.

Back outside in the stifling heat, I strolled back to the car and paid $8 for the privilege of parking there, despite seeing there was free parking beside the Capitol – thanks to my GPS not working I got screwed. And now despite being on the top of the roof and using the external antenna for the GPS, still no satellites. I began to think about this more laterally. As I drove through the streets in a blind panic, verging on a liquid breakdown of the tear ducts, I pulled over and decided to try to head to Driftwood, a small town outside Austin where the Salt Lick BBQ joint is located, that Adam Richman on TV’s “Man V Food” programme had been taunting me about for over 3 years. Eventually the Hertz GPS seemed to catch sight of a satellite or two and began issuing vague directions – honestly this thing is about as useless as those early cartographers who thought the world was flat! I pulled over at a gas station to buy some cheap gas – did I mention how cheap gas is in Texas? IT’S EXTREMELY CHEAP! Now theorise as you will about why that might be (think about that for a second), gas seems to be on average ¢50-¢75 a gallon cheaper than California, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Utah – and it’s over a $1.50 cheaper than gas anywhere near Yosemite National Park!! Here’s where my earlier theories spawned a new GPS-related hypothesis; there are two GPS devices (Garmin and that hateful Hertz thing) trying to get signal at the SAME time… If you think about the accuracy level of civilian GPS services – they’re only good to about 12ft or 4 meters. So imagine two GPS devices trying to ‘lock on’ to a signal in space when they’re both less than 6-inches apart?! Bingo, my theory seemed plausible (mind you it took a restroom break – where all good ideas come from – to solve this). Outside as the $30 of gas pumped into the Chevy, I knelt down, ripped off the panel from where the Neverlost’s wire seemed to protrude, broke the connector (safely, I might add) and killed the useless creation for once and for all (earlier in the week I’d considered buying a pair of pliers to snip it and remove it from the dash to ease the pain of its hideousness on my eyes). Once I tidied up a bit, put the lance back in the gas pump, sat into the Malibu and turned the key, HEY PRESTO THE GARMIN WORKED! Now I could try it out but I was pretty confident I’d done the business.

12 miles later and the Garmin guided me safely to the Salt Lick BBQ joint in the hills above Austin. But there was nobody here. I’d read the reviews of this place lately too and people were divided – some liked it and others thought it a poor quality product. After bravely pushing the door open and asking the 4 young people inside (listen to the grandfather like!) if they were open (clearly they were, I just wanted to break the conversation a little and get some food), I was told to find my own seat and given a menu with BBQ sauce smears. So already they were off to a bad start. Remember, I’d already had one of the best meals of my life in Bobby Q’s BBQ in Phoenix Arizona, so I was expecting this to be less than that, but still good. Anyway, you know the way people say to never meet your heros because you’ll always be disappointed? Well yeah, they’re right. I’d created such an aura of expectation about this place that when the $15 plate of food arrived (that I thought I’d have leftovers from) I picked through the dry turkey, bland brisket, overcooked rib (singular I might add) and reasonably nice sausage (more like a European one, but lets be honest here, Tesco have an own-branded sausage that’s just as good!). I was gutted. Worse than that in fact. The service was truly awful and as I walked outside, I actually wanted to stop patrons going inside and tell them to spend their money elsewhere. If you Google barbecue in Austin, you’ll find that Franklin’s is up there as one of THE places to get good ‘cue’, but sadly they’re closed this week (just to add to my run of good fortune this week!). I was actually gutted though – this was the second place on the MvF recommendation list I’d been to (remember Gino’s East in Chicago) and the first I’d actually eaten in and I was very let down. In fact, I’m not going to let that programme dictate any more of my culinary decisions. As I turned to get into the Malibu, deflated, I saw the larger building to the left with its raft of air conditioners on the roof and realised this place is more about the image and the marketing it received from the show than anything else, and its focus is on the sales of ancillary items such as the t-shirts, sauces and the catering services you can hire. Such a travesty, as they have all the right infrastructural ingredients, but a lack of soul. Bobby Q’s might be the same out back, but the combination of my low expectations and the phenomenal food I ate there lead me to believe that this is not barbecue at Salt Lick, it’s cooked meat served on a marketing proposal.

Still annoyed I’d let myself be fooled by television, I decided to check out the hotels for the night – and Austin is not cheap! I’ll openly admit that the reason I’d come here was for the Salt Lick, and that done and regretted, I wanted to move on. I know I did Austin a disservice by not visiting it properly, but I literally was so angry with myself and the whole AT&T / MiFi / GPS stuff, I just wanted out. I decided to keep the head of steam in front of me and move north to Dallas where I booked a hotel in Plano, a suburb to the north of the city. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do tomorrow, but at this, the geographical half-way point in the journey, I’m turning over a new leaf. No more tourist trap shit. I want to explore the real America. The crazy guy I met at the fountains at Bellagio who kept talking to me about how he was waiting for his wife to come down to see a show etc., he made a very good point in the midst of my constant suspicion that he was trying to distract me while I was pick-pocketed – Gerry said that I should visit the small towns. Last night as I drove through Fredericksburg, I think he was right – I do need to visit the small towns. And in fact, had I not had the Salt Lick on my brain and the hotel in Austin booked beforehand, I’d have checked into one of the motels in Fredericksburg and spent an hour or so walking the street the following morning. So from here, I’m not sure where I’m going, but I’ll give Dallas a look tomorrow and then feel my way through to my date at the Hertz office on October 1st in Chicago. There aren’t many big cities left in the tour anyway; Toronto, Washington D.C., New Orleans. We’ll see.